The Tropes of Trauma

Hamida Bosmajian
Children's Literature, Volume 37, 2009, pp. 293-299 (Review)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chl/summary/v037/37.bosmajian.html

Access Provided by University of Delhi at 06/17/11 3:58AM GMT

The Tropes of Trauma

Hamida Bosmajian

Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War, edited by Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2008. Academics who have devoted decades to the study of childrens literature are still waiting for their colleagues to accept them inter pares and acknowledge childrens literature as indispensable and foundational to the study of literature. No contributor to the collection Under Fire seems to have realized this more acutely than Mitzi Myers, in her brief and elegiac essay Please Dont Touch My Toys: Material Culture and the Academy. Deprived of all her books by a devastating fire, Myers is both critic and mourner and, in need of respite and healing, immerses herself like a child in the magic of the Harry Potter books. Up to the very end of her life, Myers was passionately and intellectually engaged in making childrens literature the basis for literary studies. It is fitting that the collection is dedicated to her memory. Yet, Under Fire is to some extent but a shadow of her vision. Its genesis, as stated in the preface, was in long-distance communications between Myers and Elizabeth Goodenough, beginning with conversations about the war games children play and, eventually, leading the two scholars to challenge the boundaries of childrens literature, redefining literary and material culture so that child studies would be repositioned at the heart of cultural experience (ix). The special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn on Violence and Childrens Literature (24.3, September 2000) initiated the project officially and was to be followed by a conference titled Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War. Myers hoped that something radically new would be sparked in critical thought about this subject, comparable perhaps to the genesis of womens studies as initiated by Gilbert and Gubar in the 1970s. But in the summer of 2001 Myerss health was failing due to her injuries sustained while trying to rescue her books from the fire in her home. Myers died on 5 November 2001 at the age of sixty-two; the conference took place without her powers of inspiration. The great paradigm shift in the study of childrens literature did not happen; the flowering of new child-centered connections in the academy (ix) still awaits its season. This is not to say that the anthology under review here is not valuable; it is, but it is not a transformative
Childrens Literature 37, Hollins University 2009.

293

294

Hamida Bosmajian

study of the traumatized child and the defenses that enable writers to tell a story that can be told to the child and yet bear true witness to the nightmare of history. Though Myerss vision may fade somewhat into Wordsworths light of common day, the reader comes away enriched by new insights into the texts, supplied with useful tools for literary studies, and moved by the often sensitive and personalized empathies adults express for the traumatized child. In their excellent introduction, Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel define the rationale and content of the essays in Under Fire: Part I, Hearts and Minds, problematizes the ethics of wooing and mobilizing children for war; Part II, Representing Trauma, explores the difficulty of translating the experience of trauma into narratives for children; Part III, The Holocaust in Hindsight, to a certain extent the core of this collection, combines the issues of the psychology of trauma representation with the social and ethical imperatives to convey a specific historical event through literature for the young; Part IV, Storying Home, offers personalized accounts of trauma and defense mechanisms from several professional and creative perspectives through the metaphor of journeying through the dark woods, aware that storytelling alone cannot release the traveler from memories of suffering or reconcile him to either inhuman cruelty or monstrous miscarriages of justice (14). Many pages later, Pamela Reynolds admits in the afterword that the constraints on childrens literature will limit its ability to reflect on war and trauma and therefore limit its influence (253). The anthology, which includes several relevant colored plates, concludes by appending an 1807 father and son conversation about the ambivalence of war. An extensive bibliography is specific to the essays in Under Fire and is followed by a perfunctory index. Goodenough and Immel include three essays from Mitzi Myerss oeuvre: the serviceable Storying War: An Overview and No safe place to run to: An Interview with Robert Cormier, both of which were first published in the Violence and Childrens Literature issue of the Lion and the Unicorn. It is her elegiac valedictory essay Please Dont Touch My Toys, a fairy tale from riches to rags, that stays with the reader: the story of a girl named Mitzi who possessed infinite riches in her books and then lost them in a fire. Unlike a child, however, Myers was aware of her trauma and knew that the Harry Potter series that saved her for a time was indeed a protective bandage between herself and her wounds. In one way or another, the wound that is trauma and the story that bandages it inform all the discussions in Under Fire: Childhood in the

The Tropes of Trauma

295

Shadow of War, a title that from the beginning establishes the binary: unspeakable experience and its displacement. While most of the discussion focuses on the child as victim or survivor, Part I historicizes war narratives for the young. In his Surely there is no British boy or girl who has not heard of the battle of Waterloo: War and Childrens Literature in the Age of Napoleon, M. O. Grenby, for example, demonstrates convincingly how from their first appearance during the Napoleonic Wars, war narratives for children projected a fundamental ambiguity: the fantasy of the heroic and glorious soldier and the moral judgment of war as fratricide. Childrens books, narrative or pictorial, are easily adjusted to the simplified schema and aims of modern war propaganda, argues Eric Johnson in Under Ideological Fire: Illustrated Wartime Propaganda. He focuses on French integrative propaganda during the Great War and then turns to agitating Nazi propaganda for World War II. We know today that adulation of Hitler was a favorite propaganda device for the Hitler Youth; unfortunately, Johnson leaves the reader with the impression that Elvira Bauers notorious and, yes, obscene antiSemitic picturebook, published three years before the war, is standard Nazi propaganda in childrens literature. Bauers Trau keinem Fuchs auf grner Heid und keinem Jud auf seinem Eid (Dont trust a fox in a green meadow nor trust the oath of a Jew) consists primarily of crude and offensive full-page pictures of Jews as doctors, butchers, seducers, but Johnsons choice of picture to be included as a color plate is the last image in Bauers story, which depicts a happy marching and singing group of blond Hitler boys as a contrasting vision. The choice makes the reader suspect self-censorship, but undercuts the full impact of the vicious agitating propaganda in this now rare picturebook. While Bauers book was indeed widely disseminated and part of many and various means to spread anti-Semitic propaganda, Johnson draws too easy a connection between it and the Wannsee Conference of 1942, which set up the implementation of the Final Solution. Johnson also includes a discussion of Vichy as well as Japanese propaganda, two areas that are rarely discussed in the context of childrens literature. His essay would have benefited from a technical definition of propaganda in mass societies, especially those with imperialist and military ambitions as was the case with Germany and Japan. Part II explores the problematics of representing traumatic evil to young readers through images and language. Lore Segals Baby Terrors and the reprint of Mitzi Myerss interview with Robert Cormier, as well as Margaret Higonnets Picturing Trauma in the Great War,

296

Hamida Bosmajian

are to a large extent exploratory. There is, of course, a great difference between the child reader who has experienced trauma and the child who is to be introduced to a traumatic situation through narrative. The narratives by authors who suffered trauma and needed ways to cope with it tend to be multileveled texts. This is certainly evident in Mark Heberles The Shadow of War: Tolkien, Trauma, Childhood, Fantasy. Supported by the extensive biographical work on Tolkien, Heberle argues that the perpetual war in Lord of the Rings is anchored in the authors unresolved traumas and anxieties caused by early childhood losses and dislocations and, most significantly, by the Great War from which Tolkien emerged as sole survivor among his group of friends. As a four-year-old, Tolkien began to devise alternate worlds through language and eventually create[d] places where his imagination could be satisfied for ever, the World of Middle Earth and the Three Ages with their associated languages, histories, and distinctive peoples (131). The Lord of the Rings, Heberle contends, is indeed a post-traumatic narrative (138). Tolkiens trauma is transmuted into the shadow of war (142), a trope of war. Heberle cites Speaking the Language of Pain by Kali Tal, who argues that trauma literature demonstrates the unbridgeable gap between writer and reader and thus defines itself by the impossibility of its taskthe communication of the traumatic experience (21718). A narrative is part of the literature of trauma when the identity of the author as author is inseparable from the identity of the author as trauma survivor (217). The experience of trauma, and the urge to bear witness and to find a community of listeners, motivates the writer of trauma literature. Kali Tal would exclude most of the literature written for young readers out of the motivations of never again and lest we forget: these are ethical and didactic impulses, not the traumatized persons need to tell her or his story to a community of listeners. If it were possible to traumatize the young reader, to stun and shock that reader, then the author of such a narrative himself would be a perpetrator inflicting trauma transgressively. This needs to be kept in mind whenever writers or critics propose that it is time to have young readers face what the Holocaust was really about, as if this were possible. The essays in Part III reveal directly or indirectly by the quality of their content that the study of the Holocaust and literature has been part of literary studies in America ever since Lawrence Langer published The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination in 1975. What was foreshadowed in the previous sections is now clear: the inexpressible reality of historical trauma requires a representation by means of a more or less

The Tropes of Trauma

297

constructed reality set over and against the traumatic experience. The traumatic story that cannot be told is, nevertheless, always already the more or less evident subtext of the story, told for therapeutic reasons or ethical testimony. I venture to suggest that, as time goes by, the modes and tropes of telling will become increasingly conventionalized and in that process move further away from the memory of traumatic experience in historical time. Kenneth Kidds A is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the Childrens Literature of Atrocity and U. C. Knoepflmachers The Hansel and Gretel Syndrome: Survivorship Fantasies and Parental Desertion appeared first in the Trauma and Childrens Literature forum in Childrens Literature 33 (2005). Kidds discussion is especially insightful as a survey of psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and their mutually enhancing influences in literature for childrens literature about atrocity. He begins by noting that certain narratives for the young are beginning to show what some critics have advocated, namely a more direct confrontation in representations of the Holocaust, because we no longer have the luxury of denying evil or postponing the childs confrontation with such (162). Kidd wonders if we can now expect reading about trauma to be traumatic itself (162): If A is for Auschwitz, T stands not only for trauma, testimony, and theory, but also for transference and transmission (169). The purpose of such secondary trauma would be to bear witness to Holocaust experience which has become akin to the unconscious from which we draw points of remembrance from a primal scene of evil that is forever relived and reconstructed (163). Kidd finds the thematic of trading places in novels such as If I Should Die Before I Wake or The Devils Arithmetic highly problematical and a misuse of identity politics via fairy tale magic into another world, claiming all the while direct confrontation with evil. He also considers the picturebooks and narratives that appeared after 11 September 2001 to be even more dubious. These stories insist on the traumatized reader and redefine trauma, according to Kidd, as the stuff of pop psychology . . . we want books to give children hope, to nurture them and aid their development. But a coloring book about September 11? A personal keepsake? Complexity and collectivity are refused in the name of the infantile citizen (177). Kidd concludes by cautiously endorsing Louis Lowrys The Giver, lauding it for its respect for collective rather than individual memory, a cautionary tale about US culture and about the need for a thoughtful literature of atrocity (180). One of the examples in U. C. Knoepflmachers essay about child abandonment and childrens resilience in rallying community support

298

Hamida Bosmajian

is Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushners Brundibar, which combines the Hansel and Gretel convention with the supportive peer values in Frances Hodgson Burnetts A Little Princess. Knoepflmacher also acknowledges a stark difference, namely that Brundibar is not only a Czech childrens opera (1938) about two Christian children who eventually get the prescribed milk for their sick mother by driving the evil Brundibar out of town with the help of a chorus of children; it also is a significant historical moment in the transit camp of Terezin where the children, eventually murdered in Auschwitz, performed the opera fifty-five times. Even though Sendak claimed in a lecture that he regarded Brundibar as a reassuring closure for lifelong cultural and personal traumas inflicted by the Holocaust (187), Knoepflmacher appears to recognize this as authorial unreliability and argues that Sendak and Kushner had to write a double text, one for children and one for adults: we admire the childrens resilient and defiant imagination to drive the Hitler look-alike Brundibar out of town, but know at the same time that the performers will be victims of the Holocaust. Knoepflmachers analysis opens up the discussion of Brundibar, which awaits further exploration; for example, the question as to the sustainability of a fantasy as the traumatizing moment is developing, and how that fantasy might differ from the one written years after the disaster. The illustrations in Brundibar continually suggest that the traumatic moment can break through any time, for many of the children are wearing the Nazi-imposed Yellow Star and the last pages double text of the Jewish elders invitation to a party after the expulsion of Brundibar is overwritten by Brundibars dark scrawling pen announcing his return. In her essay Gila Almagors Aviyah: Remembering the Holocaust in Childrens Literature, Naomi Sokoloff introduces the American reader to the many-talented Israeli author Gila Almagor. The Summer of Aviyah (1987), also a play and a film, Under the Domim Tree (1992), addresses the topic of relationships of Holocaust survivors in Israels pioneer days, both between parent and child, and within the community of young survivors. In a sense, the State of Israel is once more that alternative world to be built and realized in historical time over and against the scene of trauma. Sokoloff regrets that in spite of Almagors high visibility in Israel as an author who crosses the boundaries between children and adults, she has attracted very little serious literary interpretation or criticism, no doubt because of the generally low status of childrens literature within literary studies (204).

The Tropes of Trauma

299

Finally, Part IV begins with three short personal essays: the pediatrician John Galls recollection of a traumatized American child whose mother almost murdered him and who managed to survive only by telling over and over again how a great black widow spider tried to kill him; Mark Jonathan Harriss account of how he came to make the film Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, and how that film helped to break silences among survivors; and Mitzi Myerss valediction, Please Dont Touch My Toys. The section concludes with Maria Tatars Appointed Journeys: Growing Up with War Stories. In one way or another, the childs quest through the dark fairy-tale forest or the nightmare of history must empower the child, as it does in Lois Lowrys Number the Stars as well as in stories in which the child dies, as Tatar demonstrates in her discussion of Innocentis Rose Blanche and Sendaks Mili. Of course neither the little girl in Mili nor Rose Blanche is shown dead; their deaths are made lyrically ambivalent, in both cases through the image of flowers, tropes of spring and lifes eternal renewal. Not necessarily intentionally, Tatars essay, while provocative, opens a lot of further questions regarding the central issue in Under Fire. If the reader expects an answer to the question of how we can represent the traumatic disaster of the Holocaust and other atrocities in terms of experience and testimony in narratives for children, she will be disappointed at the lack of conclusiveness. Mitzi Myerss encompassing vision may well have to be indefinitely postponed. But that is all right. What does emerge are patterns of fantasy displacements and compensations over and against the sites of murder. The child under fire is at that moment at the site where trauma brands the human being; the child in the shadow of war is the survivor for whom the war will always be the subtext to everything termed normal and to everything that is displaced into and heightened by fantasy, for every oral history, every narrative, poem, or graphic work of art about trauma is, in one way or another, an ordering of traumatic experience, a bandaging or dressing of the wound or, in time, the scar. Only those who shared the same scene of trauma can possibly understand the pain of being thus wounded. When we write or talk about stories intended to give meaning and instruction to the young, we are really still very much lost in the dark woods.
Works Cited Tal, Kali. Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of the Literature of Trauma. Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam Literature. Ed. Philip K. Jason. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991. 21750.